Formerly CyclingTribe

Was that 600 logged-in active members, or just 600 visitors in total (including guests and search engine spiders)? If it was an overall figure then your 100-200 may be just fine and accurate (in terms of logged-in members).

XenForo developer

Just to be clear are you correctly distinguishing between Members and Guests?

It's not uncommon to see the number of guests browsing drop after changing forum software because that is usually down to your visibility in Search results changing as Google starts de-indexing your old URLs and re-indexing your new URLs. Do you have any sort of redirection in place from the old URLs to the new?

It would be very unusual for the number of members to drop drastically, unless it's down to what Arty is hinting at which basically refers to how long a member is considered to be inactive before going offline.

e.g. the online status timeout for XenForo is 15 minutes. So if a user logs on and does nothing for 15 minutes, after 15 minutes, they are no longer classed as online. It may be that in vBulletin this number was much higher, thus appearing as though you had more concurrent visitors online at once (this would actually effect the numbers of guests browsing too).

Well-known member

You didn't do anything stupid like over clock.net did and change from having tapatalk to not having tapatalk did you? That's what killed their traffic in a very noticeable way to even the most casual of observers. Even if you hate it you can't drop it in a platform switch if you already had it.

I know man, I find XF to be very intuitive, but the old, computer illiterate guys on my site can't even see to logon. It is horrendous. I am 56, not a coder, IT or computer geek, and I took to it right off. I am like WTF is going on here?

N

Nelson T.

Guest

Was that 600 logged-in active members, or just 600 visitors in total (including guests and search engine spiders)? If it was an overall figure then your 100-200 may be just fine and accurate (in terms of logged-in members).

Nelson T.

Guest

Just to be clear are you correctly distinguishing between Members and Guests?

It's not uncommon to see the number of guests browsing drop after changing forum software because that is usually down to your visibility in Search results changing as Google starts de-indexing your old URLs and re-indexing your new URLs. Do you have any sort of redirection in place from the old URLs to the new?

It would be very unusual for the number of members to drop drastically, unless it's down to what Arty is hinting at which basically refers to how long a member is considered to be inactive before going offline.

e.g. the online status timeout for XenForo is 15 minutes. So if a user logs on and does nothing for 15 minutes, after 15 minutes, they are no longer classed as online. It may be that in vBulletin this number was much higher, thus appearing as though you had more concurrent visitors online at once (this would actually effect the numbers of guests browsing too).

We usually had 300 members 300 guests more or less. Now 50 members, 70 guests.

I added redirection as per the instructions. I will show you.

Here is my 301config.php:

Code:

<?php
/* ----------------------------------------------------------- *\
This variable defines where XenForo is installed.
If you have not installed XenForo into the same directory in which
vBulletin was installed, you will need to provide the full path to
the XenForo directory here. Remove the leading // and then enter
the path as in the following examples:
$fileDir = '/home/example/public_html/new_forums';
$fileDir = 'C:/inetpub/wwwroot/xenforo';
\* ----------------------------------------------------------- */
$fileDir = '/home/hobbymac/public_html';
/* ----------------------------------------------------------- *\
This constant defines the table from which the import redirection
scripts will fetch their data. Normally they will use the table
'xf_import_log', but if you have archived your import data, you
should provide the name of the archive table here. Remove the
leading // and then replace 'import_log_x' with the name of your
archive table, as in the following examples:
define('IMPORT_LOG_TABLE', 'my_import_log');
define('IMPORT_LOG_TABLE', 'import_log_my_forums');
\* ----------------------------------------------------------- */
define('IMPORT_LOG_TABLE', 'archived_import_log');

Formerly CyclingTribe

Don't worry about bothering people on here - most of us have been through a migration and some of us have experienced similar issues - so bother away!

I appreciate there are some visual / link differences between vB and XF but did you have a custom style in vB or did you use the default? How "radically" different is your XF layout compared with your previous vB one? (I ask because that seems to be a key issue when migrating - keeping things as familiar as possible seems to be a great help in smoothing the transition).

I note you have a notice to encourage members to contact you for help - that's good. How about recoding and posting a video of how to login and access / change your user settings? I did a couple of these and they helped - you know, that "Oh, hey, there it is ..." moment when they find a familiar feature or link in the new software.

Maybe some screen-shots to show where common links / settings are? (I noticed you've changed the New Posts link and moved it - presumably to help people get used to the change?).

Basically do anything and everything you can think of to help people find their way around - and after that, just wait for people to miss the community and get off their behinds and put the little bit of effort in to finding their way around; it's true, people really don't like change so you've got to do all you can to hold their hand until they settle in.

You are likely going through a reindex period and with non-working redirects for some period of time you've stacked up a bunch of 404s in Google's queue. You post activity looks great to me although I don't know what it was like before. You have 3 pages of new posts from today already.

Well-known member

Put this into your address bar and start clicking on links returned. Quite a few links are broken at this point and either need to be manually redirected to new urls in your .htaccess or you need to ride out the re-index.